The present invention relates to a camera which can be selectively set to a standard photographic mode or a supertelephotographic mode.
In the cases of telephotography with a conventional 35-mm camera, a suitable telephoto lens must be selected and mounted on the camera body. Therefore, one must always carry a number of interchangeable telephoto and other lenses which are expensive and heavy in weight. Thus, the conventional 35-mm cameras have a poor degree of portability. In case of supertelephotography with a supertelephoto lens with a focal length of longer than 200 mm, the overall weight of the camera body and the supertelephoto lens becomes very heavy, so that one finds it very difficult to operate them or to focus a subject as he or she cannot hold the camera securely. Further, it is very troublesome to exchange the telephoto lens with a standard lens after the telephotography. Because of such poor operativity, one tends very frequently to miss "shutter" changes. In addition, the collection of various interchangeable lenses is prohibitively expensive.
There has been devised and demonstrated a compact camera of the type which uses 110-size films and which can be selectively set to a standard photographic mode or to a telephotographic mode by one operation of a selection knob or the like. However, a telephotographic lens system incorporated in such a camera as described above corresponds only to a telephoto lens of a focal length of 100 mm for 35-mm cameras. To put in another way, there has not been devised and demonstrated a compact-size camera with the telephotographic capability corresponding to that with a telephoto lens of a focal length of 200 or 500 mm.
There has been also devised and demonstrated a camera combined with a binocular. This camera is advantageous in that while one is viewing through the binoculars, one can depress a shutter button so as to obtain a photographic record. There has been already devised and demonstrated a camera combined with a binocular capable of telephotography corresponding to to the use of a telephoto lens of a focal length of 200 mm, but the camera is large in size. In addition, with this camera standard photography is impossible so that its use is limited to photography in the field.